Wall Street titan Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, said the “booming” US economy was “unbelievable”, with the average consumer “much wealthier than before”.
The state of Georgia is one of the big beneficiaries of this spending spree. It is part of the so-called Battery Belt, an area of land largely across the south east where factories for electric car batteries and related components are springing up.
Covington is best known as the small town where the Vampire Diaries was filmed, but it is now the site of a factory for Archer Aviation, which will be completed this year. It plans to mass-produce what it describes as flying cars, though the model I saw looked more like a giant drone-copter, with a dozen propellers and wheels.
Across town, the ground has been prepared for a factory for electric trucks. Once finished, it’s expected to produce thousands of $100,000 trucks every year. On the Georgia coast, within a year a brand new Hyundai “meta factory” for electric cars and batteries will start production, with plans to produce half a million cars a year.
Yet at the local Scoops ice cream parlour, both locals and tourists say they don’t feel they are living through a boom. Prices remain high. Families are depending on their credit cards. This is an industrial boom, taking place in factories and not something people have noticed in their everyday lives.
“It’s not terrible,” one customer told me. “I mean, we adjust to it, the cost of everything, and you just kind of move on. We’re not going to stop living life as things are, but just work harder. That’s our motto.”
That prices are still rising by more than expected means interest rates are staying high. The cost of borrowing in the US is currently at its highest level for 22 years as the US central bank tries to slow inflation.
But in Georgia’s capital, the Atlanta Federal Reserve president Raphael Bostic says many people are “less sensitive” to interest rate rises than they were. He says this is because of the trend in the US for long-term, 30-year mortgages – people’s biggest loans are often fixed at a much lower rate.
Yet the US decision to keep rates higher for longer has a knock-on effect outside the US. If you are facing a rise in mortgage rates in the UK, that can be directly traced back to European markets following the US and assuming interest rates will come down more slowly than expected.
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